Whatever your views on the music or the performance, that this
recording exists at all is an extraordinary story, and due congratulations
must be offered to the hard work and dedication of all involved,
in particular of Jennifer Condon. Her “normal” job is as a prompter
at the Hamburg Opera, but she has been responsible for editing
this previously unpublished work, preparing it for performance,
persuading a large and distinguished cast to take part, in some
cases without any remuneration, as well as conducting the performance.
This shows a commitment to the work that may seem eccentric
to the cynical but heroic to others who have laboured in vain
on behalf of other similarly neglected works.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks was an Australian composer whose teachers
included Vaughan Williams, Egon Wellesz and Nadia Boulanger,
who was married for a time to Stanley Bate, another neglected
composer, and who spent twenty years in New York before moving
to Greece and finally back to Australia. Her other works include
the opera The Transposed Heads, commissioned by the
Louisville Orchestra and recorded by them in the 1950s and in
1984 by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. I have listened
many times to both recordings with increasing pleasure so that
I have been very eager to hear the present discs.Sappho is a setting of an adaptation by the composer
of a verse play by Lawrence Durrell. It tells of the Lesbian
(but not lesbian) poet Sappho in her latter years when she was
married to a wealthy local merchant, Kreon. The various scenes
show her with the twin brothers, Pittakos and Phaon, with her
tutor, Minos, and with Diomedes, a drunken poet. Towards the
end she is exiled to Corinth on a false charge of incest. Her
final monologue, the only part of the opera to have been publicly
performed, is the clear climax of the opera, with Sappho accepting
the impermanence of personal relationships as well as of her
own life. It mirrors similar scenes at the end of operas by
Strauss and Janácek, albeit that it is very different in its
musical style. That style derives to a great degree from the
composer’s attempt to reduce the importance of harmony in music,
and to throw the emphasis instead on texture and tone, melody
and heterophony. The result may seem a little bland at first
but the listener soon adjusts to the composer’s very individual
style.

A quick glance at the cast list shows several distinguished
Wagnerian singers. Very surprisingly that appears to have been
a necessity due to the weight of some of the orchestration.
The conductor’s note indicates that she believes that with adjustment
to dynamics and some of the orchestration it could be performed
on a smaller scale, and I have to say that this would be welcome.
In fact the ideal might be to retain the Wagner-sized voices
but allow them to sing at somewhat less than full power. That
would permit a more nuanced approach to performance and a more
natural delivery of the, admittedly somewhat flowery, text.
I am full of admiration for the cast here, who have taken on
a major new work with obvious enthusiasm, but it has to be admitted
that for much of the time there is a lack of any attempt at
light or shade in their singing. The many singers for whom English
is not their first language cope well but it cannot be said
that the result sounds idiomatic. Admittedly the results in
the case of the English-speaking artists are not all that much
better, and although I attempted to follow what was being sung
without it after a while I found myself wholly dependent on
the printed libretto to understand what was being said or even
who was saying it.Sappho is by no means as immediately attractive as
is The Transposed Heads, partly due to an apparent
preponderance of slow or slowish music, but enough is revealed
through this very welcome issue to suggest that subject to the
preparation of a performance edition that would make it kinder
to singers and to a greater familiarity with the work it would
certainly merit stage performance. In the meantime we should
once again thank Jennifer Condon for her untiring efforts to
make it possible to hear the work and all the singers and players
who helped her in this. Congratulations also to Toccata Classics
whose presentation of the issue, with essays on the work, the
edition, Durrell and Sappho, together with the full libretto,
does all that could be done to help the listener and encourage
understanding of this important discovery.John Sheppard

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